Clearly, the caribou recovery strategy is not based on ecological
principles or available science. Rather it represents an ideology on the
part of advocates for industrial exploitation of our environment, which
subsumes all other principles to economic growth, always at the expense
of ecological integrity. Owing to the breadth of the human niche, which
continues to expand via technological progress, the human economy grows
at the competitive exclusion of nonhuman species in the aggregate. The
real cost of Alberta's tar sands development, which includes the
potential transport of oil by Northern Gateway and Keystone XL
pipelines is being borne by wolves, caribou, and other wild species.
Ironically, the caribou strategy also unintentionally confirms what
government and industry have long denied -- that tar sands development
is not environmentally sustainable.
Consistent with Canada's now well deserved reputation as an environmental laggard,
the caribou recovery strategy evolved over several years and many
politicized iterations, carefully massaged by government pen pushers and
elected officials who did their very best to ignore and obscure the
advice of consulting biologists and ecologists. So, the government
should quit implying that the consultation approach provides a
scientifically credible basis for decisions. Apparently, scientists can
lead federal Environment Minister Peter Kent to information but they
cannot make him think.
Egged on by a rapacious oil industry, the federal government has chosen to scapegoat
wolves for the decline of boreal caribou in a morally and
scientifically bankrupt attempt to protect Canada's industrial sacred
cow -- the tar sands. Yet, the ultimate reason why the caribou are on
the way out is because multiple human disturbances -- most pressingly
the tar sands development -- have altered their habitat into a landscape
that can no longer provide the food, cover, and security they need.
The relentless destruction
of boreal forest wilderness via tar sands development has conspired to
deprive caribou of their life requisites while exposing them to levels
of predation they did not evolve with and are incapable of adapting to.
Consequently, caribou are on a long-term slide to extinction; not
because of what wolves and other predators are doing but because of what
humans have already done.
Controlling wolves by killing them or by the use of non-lethal
sterilization techniques is biologically unsound as a long-term method
for reducing wolf populations and protecting hoofed animals (ungulates)
from predation. Lethal control has a well documented failed
record of success as a means of depressing numbers of wolves over time.
Killing wolves indiscriminately at levels sufficient to suppress
populations disrupts pack social structure and upsets the stability of
established territories, allowing more wolves to breed while promoting
the immigration of wolves from nearby populations.
At the broadest level, the caribou strategy favours human selfishness at
the expense of other species. Implicit is the idea that commercial
enterprise is being purchased by the subversion of the natural world,
with one set of ethical
principles being applied to humans and another to the rest of nature.
The strategy clearly panders to the ecologically destructive wants of
society by sacrificing the most basic needs of caribou. In doing so, it
blatantly contradicts the lesson Aldo Leopold taught us so well -- the
basis of sound conservation is not merely pragmatic; it is also ethical.
Simply, the caribou strategy is not commensurate with the threats to the
species' survival. What is desperately needed is a caribou strategy
designed to solve the problem faster than it is being created.
Protecting limited habitat for caribou while killing
thousands of wolves as the exploitation of the tar sands continues to
expand will not accomplish this goal. Yet, against scientific counsel to
lead otherwise, politicians have decided that industrial activities
have primacy over the conservation needs of endangered caribou (and
frankly, all things living).
Tar sands cheerleaders try hard to convince Canadians that we can become an 'energy superpower'
while maintaining our country's environment. They are of course wrong.
Thousands of wolves will be just some of the causalities along the way.
Minister Kent and his successors will find more opportunity to feign
empathy as Canadians also bid farewell to populations of birds,
amphibians, and other mammals, including caribou, that will be lost as
collateral damage from tar sands development. The most difficult
ministerial message, we suspect, will be this government's need to issue
ongoing apologies for the scores of species that will continue to be
poisoned, persecuted and dispossessed because of tar sands development.
This raises many difficult questions; in particular, how much of our
country's irreplaceable natural legacy will Canadians allow to be
sacrificed at the altar of oil industry greed?
This article was co-authored with Dr. Paul Paquet,
Raincoast Conservation Foundation senior scientist, and Dr. Chris
Darimont, Raincoast's science director.
A version of this article previously ran in The Guardian.
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